Ferrari has no chance against Mao
11/18/2017
It was a somewhat strange constellation. At Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auctionin New York on November 16, 2017, there was also a car for sale among all the paintings and installations. But not just any car, but the Ferrari F2001 in which Michael Schumacher won the Monaco Grand Prix in 2001.
And the Hungarian Grand Prix to boot. This was at a time when the three-liters could still really roar, rev up to 19,000 rpm and develop around 900 hp. That was 16 years ago.
This car was certainly a masterpiece of engineering, but a work of art? Contemporary art?
Well, the bidders were certainly interested and instead of the estimated USD 4 to 5.5 million, the new owner finally paid USD 7.504 million (including surcharge/commission). A record price for a modern Formula 1 car.
Among famous works of art, however, this valuation was just enough for 10th place; Andy Warhol's Mao, for example, was worth an impressive USD 32.4 million to one collector, more than four times the price of the Ferrari.
And the Warhol was not even the most expensive work of art, as the "Three Studies of George Dyer", painted by Lucian Freud, fetched as much as 38.6 million.
It also turned out that the amounts paid deviated significantly more from the estimated values than is generally the case with car auctions. The Roy Lichtenstein titled "Female Head", for example, was sold for twice its estimate, while an untitled painting by Laura Owens even sold for seven times its estimate, ending up at USD 1.755 million instead of USD 200,000 to 300,000. So the 310 million for 72 auctioned works of art (including Ferrari) no longer seems "Spanish".
Will the example of completing art auctions with automobiles set a precedent? In any case, we could have imagined a more suitable addition to the artworks than the Formula 1 monoposto, such as Janis Joplin's Porsche 356 or a special bodywork by Saoutchik. But what wasn't can still be.
